Page 117 - Demo

Chapter Four 117
By 832 the Norsemen were occupying inland waters and had began sailing their gal- leys up the many navigable rivers of Ireland-into the very heart of the country. It is often claimed that this form of co-ordintaed campaign was irst instigated by a noted Norse leader named Ragnar Lodbrog, who came it is said ‘with ten thousand men in a leet of one hun- dred and twenty ships.’ The Irish knew him as Thorgils, or Turgéis, -meaning ‘servant of Thor,’ while the monks Latinised and popularised him as the brutal and ruthless ‘Turgesius.’
One part of this great leet sailed up the Lower Bann and made their headquarters in Lough Neagh from where they plundered Armagh (three times in one month it is said) and ravaged the country as far as Derry. A second part of this leet he stationed in the estuary of the Boyne; a third sailed up the Lifey; while a fourth sailed up the mighty Shannon into Lough Derg, making their headquarters on Lough Ree, from where they attacked and destroyed the famous monasteries of Lothra, Terryglass, Holy Island and Clonmacnoise. When referring to the awful destruction wrought upon the land by Turgesius’s invaders, one contemporary chronicler wrote:
“Increasingly from hundreds of monasteries rose to Heaven the mournful litany- A furore Northmanorum libera nos Domini’- ‘From the fury of the Northmen save us O Lord’.
But despite all the prayers and incantations of the monks, these successes made Turge- sius the accepted, unopposed, albeit unoicial leader of the Norse invaders in Ireland. With the intention of destroying the inluence of the Christian religion in the country, he, after plundering Armagh, established his own seat there and later enthroned his wife, Otta or Ottar, on the battered high-altar of Clonmacnoise, as pagan priestess and “oracle.” It is known that Turgesius who was accompanied by a strange wizard-like igure known as Yahya ibn-Hakam el Bekri al Djayani levied heavy tributes on the native Irish and it is claimed that the term “nose-money” or “nosegelt” is sometimes applied to these tributes, because the recognized punishment of defaulters was the loss of the organ mentioned. Other more ex- treme punishments included execution by being pelted to death with Ox bones, being used as target practice for archers or being sentenced to sufer the gruesome practice which the invaders knew as the “bloodeagle.” This entailed the living victim’s ribs being carved open and the lungs pulled out through the back and spread apart to resemble “wings.”
It was during the time of Turgesius that the Norsemen began to defend their settlements with a form of fortiication since known in Irish as “Long-Phort”-long meaning ship and port